Apocalypse Now Now Read online

  ‘Shhh, Big Ones,’ he says sternly. His hair is long and brown and he wriggles his nose as if sniffing the air.

  ‘Baxter, meet Klipspringer,’ Pat says with a smile.

  They boy sticks his head around the door again. ‘Pleasuretomeetyouthankyou,’ he says.

  ‘A pleasure,’ I say. ‘He … works here?’

  ‘Oh God no,’ Pat says. ‘Trying to get him to tidy his room is trouble enough.’

  Klipspringer walks out from behind the door. ‘Whoa!’ I say, stepping away quickly.

  He chuckles with delight. ‘Whoa!’ he mimics, jumping backwards, his little hoofs clattering on the driveway.

  Klipspringer is about twelve years old and has the body of a springbok and the torso and head of a human. His little white tail wags with delight as he trots up and down looking slyly at us, his nose twitching with happiness.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Pat says to me. ‘He won’t hurt you.’

  ‘Won’t hurt you, Big One,’ Klipspringer says. ‘Duh, Big One, duh! You smell funny.’

  ‘Now,’ Pat says, putting her hands on her hips, ‘what did we say about being polite?’

  ‘Alwaysbepolitenevertellpeopletheystink,’ the boy recites dutifully.

  ‘That’s right,’ Pat says as she tries unsuccessfully to comb back his wild hair with her fingers.

  Klipspringer tries to wiggle away.

  ‘Hey!’ he says brightly. ‘Want to see my room, Big One?’ He trots up and down on the spot excitedly. ‘Want to see my room?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I say. ‘Ronin probably wants to go and –’

  ‘Baxter,’ Pat says, ‘do I have to give you the speech about being polite as well?’

  I sigh. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘Let’s see your room.’

  I squeeze in through his door, moving an old, rusty tricycle out of my way. An abstract sculpture made entirely from doorknobs wobbles unsteadily as I pass. I dodge underneath a whole army of plastic action figures that hang from the ceiling on pieces of string, pushing a plastic Skeletor with my finger. He swings back and forth from the noose around his neck.

  The room is stacked high with a random assortment of rubbish. Posters of 2 Unlimited, André Agassi and Steven Seagal plaster the wall of Klipspringer’s incredibly messy room. Klipspringer flicks a switch and the whole room is illuminated with dozens of strings of brightly coloured Christmas lights.

  ‘Ta-da!’ he says with a sweeping gesture. ‘Best room in the universe.’

  ‘It’s great,’ I say.

  ‘Duh,’ he says, slapping his forehead. ‘Of course it’s great.’ He grabs my wrist and looks around theatrically. ‘You ever seen a nipplestar?’ he whispers. ‘In the paper book, hey?

  I shake my head. He winks knowingly and holds up a hand for me to wait and then disappears behind a stack of old soft-drink cans. I hear sounds of things being thrown around. He returns with something behind his back. ‘You wanna see, huh, huh?’ he asks. I nod. ‘Now are you sure you wanna see?’ he says with a grin.

  ‘Just show me,’ I say.

  He beams as he pulls out an old eighties nudie magazine from behind his back. ‘The nipplestars,’ he says reverently. He opens the magazine to the centrefold. Her blonde permed hair, high socks and naturally pendulous breasts seem strange to my refined porn sensibilities. But that isn’t what Klipspringer is interested in. His eyes are fixated on the silvery stars which cover the nipples, put there by the conservative apartheid government to protect South Africa’s delicate white souls.

  ‘They shine,’ Klipspringer says in awe. ‘From their chests.’

  I laugh. ‘Those aren’t stars, bok-boy,’ I say. I scratch a little with my fingernail on the silvery nipple supernovas to reveal the fleshy areolae beneath.

  ‘They aren’t real?’ he says.

  His nose twitches with disappointment and I feel like I’ve just told a kid there’s no Santa Claus. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say, remembering something, ‘the real thing is much better.’ I take my phone from my pocket and scroll through the images I’ve saved on it; big women, small women, women of every racial type.

  The bok-boy wrinkles his nose up. ‘I like the nipplestars,’ he says. I’m about to give up when I scroll to one of the creature porn images I’ve saved to show potential customers. She’s topless, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, but the lower half of her body is a tangled mess of shaggy brown goat hair. I used to think the photo was fake but now I’m pretty sure it’s not.

  Klipspringer grabs the phone and looks with awe at the photo. ‘What’s her name?’ he says softly.

  I squint at the small print in the corner of the image. ‘Jasmine.’

  ‘Jasmine,’ he repeats with reverence. He scampers away again and comes back holding a newish smartphone.

  ‘You have a phone?’ I say with a laugh.

  ‘Course,’ he says. ‘I like to play the gamegames. Pew-pew-pew.’

  I transfer the image to his phone. ‘There,’ I say. ‘Now Jasmine’s in your spank bank.’ He looks quizzically at me. ‘Never mind. I’ll tell you when you’re older,’ I say.

  ‘Now I give you something,’ he says.

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ I say. ‘That was a gift. You don’t have to give me anything.’

  He trots away and comes back with something in his palm. ‘I do. I do,’ he says. ‘I remember now. Boy with spectacles and lookthrough eyes. The lady told me to give it to you.’

  ‘Dr Pat?’ I say.

  ‘No, Big One, duh. Not Dr Pat. The other lady.’ He opens his palm and shows me a pendant on a leather cord. It’s a little brass mantis with shards of blue semi-precious stones for eyes. ‘Take it,’ he says pushing it into my hand. ‘She told me to give it to you. Take it.’

  I take the pendant and pull the cord over my neck, slipping the brass mantis under my shirt. It’s warm against my skin.

  ‘Thanks, goat-boy,’ I say.

  ‘No problemo, Big One,’ he says with a smile. ‘But be careful. It has the strongstrong magic.’

  7

  RATTLE & HUM

  ‘THE PROBLEM WITH madness is that you don’t know you’re mad until you suddenly realise you’re lying on the floor and chewing on your curtains, and wondering why the word “jelly” sounds so strange if you say it more than twenty-four times in a row,’ Ronin says as he scoops noodles into his mouth, dribbling soy sauce onto his thick red beard.

  We’re sitting in his car eating takeaways from Mr Hong’s Chinese Takeout at the tail end of Long Street. This part of the CBD is murky and decaying. Girls loiter beneath a brothel smoking and groups of guys hang around looking for customers, victims, or both.

  ‘I took four microdots of acid to help me pretend I was mad to get out of fighting on the Border,’ Ronin continues, rubbing his beard with his sleeve. ‘Turns out after four microdots you don’t really have to pretend. But I was drafted anyway. Apparently psychosis is a desirable trait in a bush war.’

  ‘What is this agency you’re involved with anyway?’ I say.

  He looks at me, the last of the noodles hanging from the chopsticks that are halfway to his mouth. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘Pat said you were an agent with her. Before “the incident”.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, as he shoves the chopsticks into his mouth. ‘What happened at MK6 is none of your goddamn business. Just drop it.’ He chucks his empty takeaway box onto the back seat.

  ‘You’re right, let’s rather focus on all the leads we’ve found today,’ I say sarcastically.

  We’ve been trawling the streets of Cape Town, looking up all Ronin’s contacts, and coming up with nothing. A big fat zero. Nobody knows anything about an Obambo with a missing tooth. In fact nobody knows anything about an Obambo at all, them being completely extinct and all.

  If nothing else it’s been an insight into Cape Town’s sweaty underbelly; we’ve seen advertising execs who deal in illicit organs on the side, junkie ex-journos who have given up the word habit but not the needle, and a Congolese
midget named Frank who directs sci-fi and fantasy porn. I took his number for future reference. They all say the same thing: the Obambo are all dead and hence incapable of kidnapping anybody.

  ‘I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but I’m going to call in a favour,’ Ronin says. ‘It may take a couple of hours to set up.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I need to go somewhere. Do you think when I get back we might make some actual progress?’

  ‘Sure thing, boss,’ Ronin says sarcastically. I’m really starting to dislike this guy.

  We drive back to his office and he drops me on the pavement outside. ‘Be back here in two hours,’ he says. ‘Oh, and sparky? You owe me a thousand bucks.’

  I walk quickly down to the station. A hyperactive guy selling bootleg Nollywood DVDs and hair products whistles and tries to catch my attention. I ignore him.

  The ‘somewhere’ I have to be is Dr Basson’s office. He sent me a text saying he’d like to see me again today and quite frankly I’m not above a little psychological help at the moment. It’s not so much the weird creatures that are getting to me, although my mind is still struggling to come to terms with those too, it’s more the headaches and visions that have me worried. I’m starting to suspect that there may be something seriously wrong with me.

  I see the train pulling into the station up ahead. I sprint through the crowd and make it through the doors just as they begin to close. As I sit down next to a sweaty lady in a wig reading a bumper compendium of Victorian erotica my phone rings. ‘Jesus, Bax,’ Kyle says. ‘I’ve been trying to call you all day. What happened? Did you meet the bounty hunter?’

  ‘I met him,’ I say.

  ‘And …’

  ‘He’s a frikken psycho,’ I say.

  ‘I told you so!’ he says with relish. ‘But, like, you’re OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. He’s a psycho but he knows what he’s doing. Kinda.’

  ‘OK, if you say so,’ Kyle says doubtfully. ‘We’ve got another problem. Dude, Rafe has gone even more mental than usual. He’s drawing all kinds of weird pictures; real bizarre shit with eyes and praying mantises and stuff. I think he’s gone off the deep end. There’s this insane one of you holding a trident and fighting this fire-creature thing. It’s like something out of frikken Conan the Barbarian or something. It’s actually kinda cool.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ he says. ‘Does that, you know, mean anything to you?’

  I don’t know what to say. I desperately want to tell Kyle about all the crazy things that have been happening, but also it’s not the easiest thing to say over the phone. Especially on the train with about fifty people in earshot.

  ‘Forget it,’ I say. ‘Take Rafe to your house. Tell my parents that I’m meeting you there and that the three of us are having a sleepover.’

  ‘Er, not to poke holes in your super-spy tactics,’ he says, ‘but that doesn’t exactly sound plausible. It’s true. I’ve never invited Rafe anywhere with me. Let alone to stay over at a friend’s house.

  ‘Just do it,’ I say. ‘I’ll take care of my parents.’

  ‘OK, fine,’ Kyle says with a sigh. ‘This sucks, man, I should be there with you. Are you sure you’re OK? You’re sounding really stressed out.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say with as much conviction as I can muster. But the truth is I’m not really sure that I am.

  Dr Basson gives me an appraising look. He leans back in his chair and taps his pen against his chin, quickly scribbles something down in his notebook, and then continues the tapping.

  ‘So, just to clarify,’ he says. ‘You’re talking about supernatural creatures? Real creatures, not metaphors or myths?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And I think my brother is psychic.’

  This has not gone well. I had come here with the intention of talking about my headaches and visions and had ended spilling the beans completely.

  ‘And these dreams you’ve been having,’ he says consulting his notebook, ‘they’re always about the past?’

  ‘Always about this girl,’ I say. ‘In the middle of some kind of war.’

  Basson nods contemplatively. ‘And this is all accompanied by an unidentified throbbing in your forehead?’

  I nod. ‘And these two voices in my head that fight over things.’

  ‘Baxter, I hate to indulge in guesswork, especially with something this serious. We can’t rule out the possibility that you have something physically wrong with you.’

  ‘What, like an illness?’

  ‘Well, a tumour for instance –’

  ‘A tumour? Jesus.’

  Basson holds up his hand. ‘I’m not saying it is a tumour. What I’m saying is that certain organic damage caused by disease could be causing these delusions. There is, of course, a hereditary history of mental illness in your family …’

  ‘Listen,’ I say. ‘I know it sounds insane.’ I bark out a high-pitched laugh. ‘But I saw these things. They’re real.’

  ‘You saw –’ he looks down at his notebook again ‘–an “elemental”, several dozen “sprites” and a boy who was half human and half …’

  ‘Springbok,’ I say.

  ‘Half springbok,’ he echoes with a small smile. ‘Your brain creates your reality, Baxter,’ he says. ‘When your brain is affected, your perception is affected. What seems ridiculous to others might seem entirely real to you. I think it may be prudent if you come to a facility that is specifically designed to deal with this kind of thing. We can do some tests –’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not going anywhere for tests. I’m finding Esmé.’

  He sighs. ‘I can’t force you, Baxter. And I can’t tell your parents without your permission. But I strongly advise you have a physical examination.’

  ‘After I find Esmé,’ I reply.

  ‘Well, I hope for your sake that you find her soon.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say.

  Back on the train next to an old guy in a fez playing Tetris on his phone. I call my mother and tell her that Rafe and I are staying over at Kyle’s house. I tell her that I’ve taken her words to heart and that I want to spend more time getting to know Rafe. We’ll bond. We’ll hug. We’ll run through fields of flowers together. That sort of thing. She’s so amazed and happy that she suspends disbelief and buys into it. It’s so easy I almost feel bad. Almost.

  The thought of a tumour, on the other hand, makes me feel slightly sick. It swirls around in my head along with images of elementals, sprites and a barn full of other beasties. My mind does its little two-sided mambo.

  BizBax: It makes a lot of sense.

  MetroBax: You think this has all been some kind of delusion?

  BizBax: I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to diagnose when we’re one of the symptoms.

  MetroBax: True. How are we going to know if this is all real or not?

  I rub my forehead experimentally. There’s nothing there. ‘No kidding, genius,’ I whisper to myself. ‘You can’t feel a tumour with your fingers.’ The old guy next to me gives me a scared look and then turns so that his body is angled away from mine. I don’t fucking blame him.

  I stare out through the window at the mountain as the train jolts to a stop. If a tumour is squeezing my brain and causing me to see elementals and bok-boys then what else is it making me do?

  It does make a lot of sense. My sudden discovery of a heart, my delusions. Maybe a tumour is making me believe I love Esmé. Making me dig her little ski-slope nose that I sometimes imagine tiny snowboarders doing backflips off of. Her haughty green eyes (with yellow flecks) that conceal something a little crazy and scared. Making me remember running my fingers along the long scar on her left hand from where she caught it on a barbed-wire fence while climbing into the mountain reservoir to swim.

  She hated dolls as a child. She loved broccoli. She sometimes sucks her thumb when she’s asleep but I never tell her. The way she dances is a bit dorky, with straight arms and weird pelvic tilts and thrusts, but I think it�
��s kinda sexy too. She has four piercings in her left ear and three in her right. She’s designed and redesigned a tattoo about a thousand times but never had it done because she can’t stand the thought of that kind of commitment. She looks at me like I actually mean something. I have a mental catalogue like this that stretches into the distance and doesn’t seem to end. Maybe it just means I’m creepy and obsessive but I don’t care. I don’t care if I have a tumour or if I’m insane. I’m going to find Esmé. I have to find Esmé.

  There’s nobody under the bridge but a pack of feral cats with green, flashing eyes. They dart across the litter-strewn pavement and disappear into the windy night. Ronin parks the car in a deep shadow and puts his feet up on the dashboard. I count out his money on my lap and hand it to him. He counts it again and then shoves it into his coat with a grin.

  ‘And now?’ I say.

  ‘And now we wait.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘Tone,’ he says.

  ‘Tone? Sounds like an R&B singer.’

  ‘Code name, smart-ass. He’s head of operations for MK6.’

  ‘Somebody has yet to tell me what that is. I mean, besides a shadowy government organisation.’

  Ronin interlaces his hands behind his head. ‘They’re mostly sangomas, witch doctors, mages, witches, that sort of thing. They keep an eye on the Hidden and make sure that nothing untoward happens.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the wrong people seeing them for one. They don’t care if the Hidden stay in the shadows. But if anybody tries to tell their story to the media then they step in.’

  ‘They can’t be doing a very good job,’ I say with a laugh. ‘I saw stories about tokoloshes in the tabloids long before I knew they were real.’

  ‘Yeah exactly, genius,’ he says. ‘And what did you think when you saw those stories?’

  ‘I thought they were tabloid bullshit,’ I say.

  ‘Bingo,’ he says. ‘They seed a lot of those stories. Who’s going to believe a story about a tokoloshe or unicorn if they read it in a tabloid?’